What Textile Does

Replace single and double primes (' and ") used as quotation marks with HTML entities for opening and closing quotation marks (‘’ and “”) in readable text, while leaving untouched the primes required within HTML tags.

Replace double hyphens (--) with an em-dash (—) entity.

Replace single hyphens surrounded by spaces with an en-dash (–) entity.

New in Textile 2.0 is the ability to store long ugly urls outside of the text you’re working in, and reference them with aliases of your choosing.

Simply store the url anywhere in the document, such as at the end, using this syntax:

[alias (optional title)]http://url

Each referenced url must begin on a new line.

Example text:
This is a "link":bob to Bob’s website.

So long as this appears elsewhere in the document:
[bob]http://itsbob.com/index.html

...the final output will be:
This is a <a href="http://itsbob.com/index.html">link</a> to Bob’s website.

Images

To insert an image, put the URL for the image inside exclamation marks.

Optional: text that immediately follows the URL in (parentheses) will be used as the Alt text for the image. Images on the web should always have descriptive Alt text for the benefit of readers using non-graphical browsers.

Optional: place a colon followed by a URL immediately after the closing ! to make the image into a link.

Defining Acronyms

HTML allows authors to define acronyms via the tag. The definition appears as a tool tip when a cursor hovers over the acronym. A crucial aid to clear writing, this should be used at least once for each acronym in documents where they appear.

To quickly define an acronym in Textile, place the full text in (parentheses) immediately following the acronym.

Example:

ACLU(American Civil Liberties Union)

Will become:

<acronym title="American Civil Liberties Union">ACLU</acronym>

Which, when displayed in a browser, will look like this (move your cursor over the text):

ACLU

NB: Textile automatically wraps a string of three or more capital letters in the <acronym> tag, even if it has no definition.